The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life by Alyssa Katz

Author:Alyssa Katz [Katz, Alyssa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Labor & Industrial Relations, Political Process, Political Parties
ISBN: 9780812993288
Google: sv_CoQEACAAJ
Amazon: B00NDTUDHA
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2015-06-23T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Why Bankers and Boards Get Richer, and Workers Don’t

Clients: Wall Street, Agribusiness, Energy

Medicine has microbes: tiny particles, invisible to the human eye, that carry life-or-death power over their foreign hosts. And so it is in the politics of business, where minuscule details of the legal code determine just how far companies can stretch in pursuit of profit.

We tend to think of laws as being made in Congress, springing to life from the womb of the Capitol dome. But most of their power takes shape through the crafting of rules by government agencies. Federal regulations harbor the power to make or cost billions for companies, to permit or ban high-risk corporate behavior, to decide who wins and who loses in the economy. That’s why Chamber of Commerce lobbyists have spent, collectively, hundreds of years helping write those rules—and with increasing fervor and success, they have gone to court to block ones that don’t suit its members.

Next time you’re at work, look for the poster explaining the rights you have as a worker to join forces with your colleagues to form a union and bargain collectively with your employer over wages and benefits. You won’t find it. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) tried to change that: in 2010 the federal regulator called for employers to put an eleven-by-seventeen poster someplace where workers could see it. The cost to each business, by the board’s estimation: $62.04 during the first year. Human resources departments would even be able to download the poster for free from the NLRB website.

There’s plenty of precedent for such posters. The sign telling workers they’re entitled to a minimum wage has been on the office bulletin board, in one form or another, since 1938. Other employee rights get their exposure too—in small type, but still. Thanks to President Richard Nixon, occupational health and safety notices instruct workers to report any suspected environmental hazards promptly to OSHA. Fellow Republican George H. W. Bush signed off on the posting, assuring workers that they can take a leave of absence when a family member is born or needs care and still come back to a job.

Equal opportunity regardless of gender, race, or age; the right to come back to work after a stint in the armed forces; even (thanks to Reagan) the right to refuse a lie-detector test: none of these pieces of paper, all of which are required by law to be on display in most workplaces, has damaged democracy.

But workers’ rights to bargain with their employers have no such status, even though federal law ensures them, and decades of union organizing have kept them alive.

A proposed 2010 NLRB regulation aimed to fix that gap and affix signs to workplace walls. Employees clearly needed the information. By that year, the rate of union membership in the United States had plummeted to 11 percent, and less than 7 percent in the private sector. While many forces account for that decline, it certainly hasn’t helped that most workers don’t even know that they can join a union and be assured—theoretically at least—that they won’t face retaliation.

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